Heart Attacks

A new study questions the long-standing practice of prescribing beta blocker pills to patients with heart disease. Analyzing an international registry of 44,708 patients with heart disease or at risk of developing it, a team of researchers compared patients who took the drugs with those who did not and found no difference in their rates of heart attack, stroke or death related to cardiovascular problems. “This confirms my intrinsic suspicion,” said Dr. P.K. Shah, director of cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, who was not involved in the study.

Here's another reason to dread mornings: Heart attacks may be slightly larger early in the day. Scientists already knew that heart attacks were more common in the morning . But they were unsure about the size of those heart attacks. In rodents, the size of heart attacks roughly follows the body's natural circadian rhythms, so they suspected the same might be true of people. Spanish researchers analyzed records of 811 patients brought to the Hospital Clínico San Carlos in Madrid, Spain, between 2003 and 2009 for a STEMI -- ST segment elevation myocardial infarction -- a severe type heart attack.

Still nipping out of your workplace or a restaurant to cop a cigarette out on the sidewalk? You are public health hero, and a grateful nation salutes you. Workplaces and eating and drinking establishments that are free of second-hand smoke have shored up Americans' health even in the face of rising levels of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, says a new study. Published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the latest research focused on Olmsted County in Minnesota, and tracked the rate of heart attacks and sudden heart attack deaths in the wake of smoking bans that cleared Olmsted County's restaurants, bars and workplaces of tobacco smoke.

Hall of Fame manager Tommy Lasorda, who retired as Dodgers manager after a heart attack in 1996, had a “mild heart attack” Monday while in New York City. He is 84, and reports say he had a stent inserted to clear a blocked coronary artery and is resting stably and comfortably at a hospital in New York City. What is a “mild heart attack,” anyway?  “A 'mild heart attack' is like being a little bit pregnant -- it's still a heart attack,” said cardiologist Dr. Robert Greenfield, chairman of medicine at Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center in Fountain Valley.

Rosie O'Donnell blogged some major gratitude Monday: The former daytime host revealed she suffered a heart attack last week. What began as an act of kindness ended in the insertion of a stent, after doctors discovered a 99% blocked artery in O'Donnell's heart. An "enormous" woman Rosie spotted in a Nyack, N.Y., parking lot had asked for help getting out of her car last Tuesday. O'Donnell obliged, writing in her free-form blog style, "it was not easy but together we did it she was up and on her way with gratitude.

As if the lost income weren't enough, unemployment appears to increase the risk of heart attacks. According to a study published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, people who were unemployed, had a history of unemployment, and even those who had short periods without work were all at a higher risk for heart attacks. Unemployment continues to be a major issue in the United States, with the national unemployment rate at 7.9%. And that leaves out many people who are underemployed or who have stopped looking for a job. Numerous studies have linked unemployment with health issues, most notably mental health.

Heart disease and depression often go together, for reasons that physicians don't really understand. So it would seem an especially bitter pill that patients with depression who are suffering from heart attacks get slower care at emergency rooms. Such is the finding from a paper just published in the Canadian Medical Assn. journal, known as CMAJ. The authors suggest this could be one reason among a number why depressed patients with heart disease have poorer medical outcomes than people with heart disease but no depression.

Middle-aged men still have higher rates of heart attacks and heart disease than middle-aged women, but those gender differences appear to be narrowing, according to a study published Monday. The findings follow earlier research, published in a 2007 issue of the journal Neurology, establishing that stroke prevalence among women ages 45 to 54 was double that of men of the same age. Together, the findings suggest "an ominous trend in cardiovascular health among midlife women," said the lead author of both studies, Dr. Amytis Towfighi, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Southern California.

Patients with osteoarthritis are vulnerable to hip and knee pain due to the wearing away of the joint's cartilage lining. One solution is to surgically replace the faulty joints. A total of 1.8 million total hip replacement and total knee replacement surgeries are performed worldwide each year. The surgeries are straightforward and patients are often released from the hospital within three days. But a new study finds that patients who have their hips and knees replaced have a dramatically increased risk of suffering a heart attack in the first weeks after their surgeries.

A few hours before a wary Landon Donovan ran onto the practice field at the Home Depot Center on Thursday, a funeral took place in Bergamo, Italy. And those two events may have more in common than you think. Piermario Morosini, a 25-year-old midfielder for Livorno in Italy's Serie B, collapsed and died of cardiac arrest in the first half of his team's match last weekend. He was laid to rest Thursday, with thousands of fans packing the streets of his hometown as his coffin, draped in numerous jerseys passed.